Those lazy hazy days of summer are all part of Lucy’s (Zoe Ziegler) summer in 1991. Lonely and alone she lives with her single mother Janet (Julianne Nicholson) in rural Massachusetts the pair of them drifting along through life. But Janet Planet initially promises far more right from the start when Lucy runs to a wall hung telephone and calls her mother to tell her, ‘I’m going to kill myself if you don’t pick me up’. That is about as dramatic as this gets because, as written by Pulitzer prize winning playwright Annie Baker, the film is a series of vignettes where individual characters make a triplet with the mother & daughter. Firstly there is Wayne (Will Hutton) an almost monosyllabic partner who spends much of the film lying on a sofa. When he leaves its Janet’s friend Regina ( Sophie Okonedo) with her irritating unwanted advice and then finally there’s Avi (Elias Koteas) a New Age hippie who heads up a nearby commune populated by the sort who regard using a ball deodorant as sexual harassment.
Janet Planet is Baker’s debut as a director and her camera invariably remains on static shots with the occasional track and there’s not much that’s visually stimulating. Low key and mostly aimless there’s little going on typified by a lingering shot that dwells on a microwave as it cooks. It’s little wonder that the film runs at two hours and becomes something of an endurance test. There’s an air of tranquillity about it all but the story and three characters are all a bit flaky and there’s little really going on though kudos to Nicholson and especially Ziegler who are an engaging couple which the story, if there is one, lacks.
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Here’s the Janet Planet trailer…..
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